Kiss The Sunset Pig, by Laurie Gough
Nothing to do with pigs, or kissing. But still very good indeed.
Judging it by the cover.
It looks weird. Clearly an American travel novel (well, I’m assuming it’s a fiction). The picture is an open road, in what looks like the american desert (although the subtitle gives that away too). It’s a bit of a grainy, blurry old image, so I suspect it’s about reminiscence, rather than a present tense journey - although that might be an assumption too far. The writing is all in pink, so a person could be forgiven for thinking that this is written either about a woman, or for a female audience.
The subtitle is “The American Road Trip with Exotic Detours”. I’m never sure quite what the word ‘exotic’ means. It might just mean “foreign”, but it can just mean weird, wacky and unusual… or sexy dancers. There are no people featured, sexy or otherwise, so it’s not giving anything away there. So, we’ll find out I guess.
How was it?
I loved reading this. So, a pretentious thought to start off with I know, but I feel I read this book at exactly the right time, and that I could relate to a lot of what the character was going through. Hopefully I’ll make that make sense.
So, firstly, a bit about the story. The book is all about travel. [You don’t say, Poirot!] Our character, Laurie, (who is also the author, so I don’t actually know if it’s a fiction or not) is, in the present, off travelling in her tired little car Marcia, from Canada, to California. (That’s way further in real life than it is in the dictionary) In something that sounds not unlike a mid-life crisis, Laurie has left her boyfriend, packed in her job as a teacher and decided to go and start a new life in California. It turns out she has been a very keen and adventurous traveller for most of her life, and after a short stay there in the past, she’s decided that California is the place for her.
Over the course of her journey she meets lots of people, has a lot of fun, encounters more than her fair share of car trouble, and most importantly does a lot of thinking and reminiscing. Over the course of her internal monologues, we hear the stories of her past travel adventures, which seem to have covered most of Europe and East Asia (not just the American continent). The stories themselves are fascinating and great fun, but the real story is in her personal journey. [Yeah, I know, that’s a bit of a dickhead, “authory” thing to say, but it’s really true in this case].
Young Laurie is the kind of young woman who has absolutely no idea where she belongs, what she wants to do and who she wants to be. She takes to the road simply out of a sense of adventure, but rather than just scratching the itch and satisfying herself with the standard gap-year that she can bore the shit out of other students by bragging about, she seems unable to stop. She becomes convinced that there’s a perfect, “best” place for her to find and settle, somewhere out there and that to settle in the wrong place would be a criminal waste of existence. This is where I felt I could deeply relate to the book. The call of adventure and her fascination with novelty were very familiar to me. Laurie found herself pulled from place to place, having experiences that were usually either transcendently soul-expanding and life-changing (until they got boring, or too real, and she felt she had to move on), or miserable, negative and leave her desperate to move on. Either way, she always ended up moving on. The whole story of her time in Korea for example, was generally hilarious. If you’ve ever thought about going there, I promise this book will definitely put you off!
Once upon a time, Laurie had lived a thoroughly ridiculous sounding period which ended in her essentially living in a cave in California. At least, that’s how it was presented at first. On a secluded, isolated beach, a cave had become Laurie’s home where she lived in tune with the universe and discovered herself. She wrote a journal full of pretentious “enlightened soul” BS, about growing in spirit and becoming disassociated from the rest of the material world. But eventually she feared that all the isolation and all the silence may leave her permanently damaged and mute, unable to ever fully reintegrate into the world, like Robinson Crusoe. Maybe she would be too enlightened and awesome for anyone else to ever understand her. So she decides to move on, begrudgingly.
It’s a lot of the same kind of bullshit that I’ve heard from a thousand post-gap year students, or from dreadlocked travelling toss-pots, usually with no shoes and looking (and smelling) like they’ve completely “transcended” the minutia of every day consumption, like showering and basically anything except cigarettes, recreational drugs and whatever other nonsense they think is more important than shoes, toothpaste and soap. Anyone who’s travelled alone a bit when they were young (by which I mean, pre-25-ish), will either have been one of those people, or met lots of those people - and probably both. I’m sure I have. The very worst ones tend to carry a musical instrument and dispense unsolicited life advice like Pez sweets. Often it’s a guitar, but could be a bongo, or even a didgeridoo. You know who you are. I hope you’re sorry.
The current day, (only slightly) more grown up Laurie is basically re-indulging the same need to shake the etch-a-sketch of her life and start again. But, slowly, she comes to get it. She had idealised and romanticised California, as well as her ridiculous stay in the cave. As it really turns out, and as she is reminded by reading her journal, she was in that cave for a whole 6 nights - so probably not long enough to become permanently mute or non-linguistic. Mostly just long enough to get really bored, lonely and hungry. And smelly. The ultimate consequence of all of it was that her restlessness and wanderlust all led Laurie to the eventual conclusion that being at home, in familiar settings and surrounded by people you know and like is not such a bad thing. You can’t go on being a travelling, barefooted “earth-mother-soul” toss-pot forever. So she eventually flies back to Canada, like a grown up.
It’s a story a can strongly relate to, and I think many people probably can. Searching for your place in the world, looking around everywhere else to try and find somewhere new and better - only to end up realising that nowhere is perfect and that your experience of any place changes with time. Novelty is by its very nature temporary, and, as was my case, sometimes the happiest place to be is just where you came from. At least for now. This really took me back to a lot of my own travelling. As a young kid, I remember sitting in our garden watching planes fly overhead. I felt sick with envy, desperate to know where they were going, what it would be like, and when I might go there myself. We weren’t the kind of family that holidayed overseas. I was 18 the first time I got on a plane, on a solo trip to France.
As a young adult, the vast majority of my early travelling was in Europe, but I was moderately adventurous and spent a lot of time abroad, doing random summer jobs, teaching English, and studying. And nowadays, in my early 40s, I travel a lot, but it’s grown-up business travel. None of that backpacking and sleeping on sofas and camping on beaches feeling the soul-enhancing sunrises and cosmic rhythms of the universe. Nowadays, I love my home town probably more than any other place I’ve ever visited. I prefer to have the aisle seat on a plane because I’d rather be able to get to the toilet and the drinks trolley than to see the scenery. I even have travel insurance. Sounds pretty lame as I write it.
The loss of that sense of awe, the dwindling of curiosity and the appeal of safety, comfort and sanity… all described woefully by Laurie hit me hard, and I could recognise them all in myself in painful detail. It was a very timely and welcome reminder of the idealistic young (toss-pot) Tom with his huge hopes for the future and his massive dreams.
Yet, this book describes Laurie driving through the Nevada desert and over the Western mountains, which I read literally while flying over the exact same place, on my way from San Francisco back to London - which was a really weird coincidence, you’ve got to admit. Even if you’re as jaded and boring as me nowadays. And ultimately, Laurie rightly diagnoses herself with simply having grown up. Her crazy roaming days are over and it’s time for a more sensible, less self-indulgent age. I fear that may be true for me too. Although I kinda hope not.
So there you go… it hit me. I am sure my future self will look back on all this introspection and laugh, but for now, it felt like the book landed in just the right place for me.
So, if you have functioning eyes and a soul, I think you should read this. It’s a wonderul book. I’ll probably be tempted to read it again myself, but nonetheless, if you’d like my copy, just let me know and I’ll send it to you, with pleasure.
In the meantime, safe travels.